Defusing the Tension
by Grac3
Summary: Amy and the TARDIS conspire to resolve the tension between the Doctor and Rory. Eleven/Rory, Amy/Rory (background). See warnings inside.


**Warnings:** Reference to drugs, slash snogging

**Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who**

* * *

"RORY!"

"_What_?"

"Control room!"

Amy was sitting in the kitchen, at least two corridors away from the fight that was about to ensue between her husband and her best friend. This was at least the third fight that they had had in a week (well, what they assumed to be a week on the TARDIS), and each and every one of them had been over trivial things.

The last one had been over the Doctor leaving one of his bow ties on the seat that Rory usually sat in to eat breakfast. Amy had been present for that one, munching on her bacon sandwich like it was popcorn; it had been rather entertaining indeed, watching them scream at each other for half an hour over something so small it really shouldn't have bothered either of them.

Yet as amusing as the fighting was, the most interesting thing happened when they had stopped talking.

They had stood either side of the offending chair, staring each other down, the anger present in their eyes accompanied by the scowls on their faces. Suddenly, the atmosphere in the room seemed to change, becoming something else that was so palpable it could have been sliced like butter with a hot knife – even though only Amy seemed to notice that anything was different from a moment before. It was enough to make her pause in the eating of her bacon sandwich – an unprecedented event in the entire expanse of space and time. For, in that moment of relative peace and absolute quiet, she was sure that she saw the Doctor's eyes flick downwards: to Rory's lips.

Confused (though not entirely surprised) at what she had just witnessed, she wasn't afforded an awful lot of time to ponder over what she had seen – and what her husband seemed to be completely oblivious of – for as soon as it had happened, the Doctor had growled in frustration, snatched the limp bow tie from the chair and strode out of the kitchen, making sure to bump his shoulder violently against Rory's as he passed.

As the door to the kitchen closed behind the Time Lord, Rory sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and his thumb and reaching out to the back of the chair, leaning against it for support as his eyes slipped closed. Amy said nothing, returning to her bacon sandwich and not quite meeting Rory's eyes again until later that day, when the kitchen and what had happened in there had been left far behind all three of them.

Now, she was sitting in the same chair in the kitchen, listening as her husband stormed passed the door to her right on his way to the control room, ready for another fight to ensue. It was a moment before the Roman reached the control room, during which there was only an anticipatory silence.

Then the shouting began.

"_What_ is this?" the Doctor exclaimed.

"A sword," Rory explained, in the same tone of voice that an incredibly impatient person would use to talk a child who was constantly pointing out the obvious.

"I know it's a sword. What is doing under the control panel?"

"I must have left it there after you insisted that I bring it when we were being chased by vampires. I didn't even need it!"

"We could have needed it!"

Amy rolled her eyes; the last planet that they had visited had been run by vampires – actual vampires, rather than fish disguising as vampires – and, as a precaution, the Doctor had recommended that Rory bring his sword, just in case. Thinking back, Amy remembered how the Doctor's eyes had widened when Rory had emerged from the depths of the TARDIS brandishing the weapon.

He had not, in fact, actually needed the sword – though during their visit, the Doctor had been drugged by a bartender at the tavern they had stopped off at to have some lunch, who was desperate to taste the Time Lord's blood. The drug he had been given had left him unconscious for hours – though they had been able to prevent the bartender from causing any serious injury to the Doctor – and the worry that Rory had shown for the Time Lord was far more than was necessary for someone who was only a friend and who had been given a non-lethal drug from which he would recover in a matter of time.

"Why don't they just snog already?" Amy sighed, as the sounds of the latest argument reverberated off of the walls of the corridor connecting the control room to the kitchen.

She was answered with a hum: a low sound that filled the entire room and made the tea in the mug on the table before her ripple slightly.

The Doctor had often reminded them that the TARDIS was sentient – as if the constant fluctuation of the location of rooms wasn't evidence enough; one time, when Amy had accidentally scraped her nails against the wall when they crash-landed on a particularly rocky planet, the ship had hidden the Ponds' bedroom from her for three days, so that she had to sleep on the sofa in the control room. Rory had been able to find it just fine (though only when he wasn't searching for it with Amy), and the problem had only been sorted when the Doctor had had a stern word with his 'sexy'.

The Doctor often went quiet for long periods of time with his hand on the wall and an affectionate look on his face, communicating with his ship as it replied with hums and whirrs. Yet the TARDIS had never directly communicated with either Amy or Rory. Amy looked up at nothing in particular, wanting to reply but not sure how.

"You agree with me, huh?" she asked, hoping that the ship would be able to hear her. The Doctor never seemed to speak to the TARDIS out loud, but then again he had mentioned that the latent psychic abilities of humans were significantly weaker than those of Time Lords, and, while he could communicate with the ship via his thoughts, it was extremely unlikely that humans would be able to do the same.

It would seem that the TARDIS had heard her, however, for her question was answered with a short, low rumble of the pipes in the walls – which Amy took to mean 'yes'.

A moment passed in relative silence, the only sound being the angry retorts being exchanged in the control room, slightly muffled by the distance they had to travel through the corridors. Then, suddenly, Amy was no longer alone in the kitchen: before her appeared a young girl, the spitting image of herself when the Raggedy Man had first crashed into her back garden all those years ago. She felt her eyes grow wide, and she slowly pushed herself up from her seat at the table to walk around the furniture and stand before herself.

"Uh..." she muttered, not sure if the fact that the TARDIS had a holographic version of herself stored within its Data Core (at least, she hoped it was holographic) was creepy or not. How was it even here anyway? Yet the girl seemed to notice her confusion, for she clarified for her.

"I am the TARDIS voice interface," the girl explained, her voice a monotone but definitely her own, with that distinctive Scottish inflection. "We can now communicate more freely."

"Oh," Amy nodded, still slightly unnerved with the fact that she was, for all intents and purposes, talking to herself. She briefly wondered if that made her mad, but then again, she had run away with her imaginary friend on the night before her wedding – there was every chance that that ship had already sailed.

"I agree with what you say," the girl said, in that still slightly creepy monotone, "and I believe I have a solution."

~{G}~

A few days after the argument over the sword – honestly, he could have stabbed himself if he hadn't noticed that sword under the control panel, and that would have been the absolute worst way for him to regenerate – the TARDIS brought her conspiracy to the fore (though the Doctor had been oblivious to the fact that his ship had been scheming quite literally under his nose).

The Doctor and Rory had had five more arguments since then, and the Time Lord was finding it difficult to stay around him anymore. He never spent any time alone with the Roman, afraid that he might say something that he regretted unless Amy was there to act as a referee, and he really didn't Rory to decide that he wanted to leave. Because, even though they constantly seemed to be at each other's throats, the Doctor still wanted to have him around.

Yet it was difficult to remember that when he found himself being chased down the corridor by an angry ex-Auton who was ranting and raving about the unnecessary danger that the Doctor had got them into on their last trip – even though it had been (almost) entirely Rory's fault for provoking the security guard in the first place. But Rory wasn't listening to reason, and now they were almost screaming at each other as they thundered down the corridors of the TARDIS. The Doctor didn't know where Amy was, but thoughts of the location of The Girl Who Waited couldn't be further from his mind as he fought with The Boy Who Waited.

"You knew that I couldn't say 'flowers' to those things-"

"_Those things_? Those things are Grieves, and they are very sensitive when it comes to anything positive. I told you not to talk about anything happy!"

"But he was holding flowers! What else was I supposed to say?"

"You should have referred to them as 'ground growths'; 'flowers' is too joyous."

"Well, sorry if I didn't remember not to be a depressing sod on the greyest planet in the universe!"

"Actually, Mawn is _not_ the greyest planet in the universe; that is actually the preserve of the, rather unimaginatively named, Grey Planet-"

He stopped abruptly as he looked around himself and realised that they had, in their preoccupation with their argument, wandered into a room that the Doctor had never seen before.

He worried for a moment that the bedroom that the two of them now found themselves in was one that had once been inhabited by one of his previous companions – for he never deleted a bedroom that had belonged to someone who had travelled with him unless they expressly said that they wanted him to, or it was absolutely necessary that he do so for some reason – yet he didn't think that any of his companions would ever have accepted such a minimal and boring bedroom; unless they happened to be a species which didn't require much sleep.

The room didn't appear to have been bothered with at all. It had a double bed with boring, plain bedding, and a bedside table with a drawer underneath. There was only minimal lighting, courtesy of a dim overhead light. There was no lamp. The walls were a dark purple, making it seem even smaller than it already was in reality, and that was it. There wasn't even a wardrobe.

"What-?" Rory began, as he looked around the room that they found themselves in, before he was interrupted by the loud _bang_ of the door slamming closed of its own accord.

"No!" the Doctor exclaimed, running up to the door and pounding his fists against it. "What are you doing?" he implored of the TARDIS, but he was met with steely silence.

Rory, resigning himself to the fact that this was the TARDIS attempting to force them to sort out their differences, didn't join the Doctor in his desperate attempts to force the wooden door open; instead, he flopped down on the side of the bed, watching as the Doctor tried to open the door.

"Why don't you try the door handle?" he suggested dryly, still angry with the Time Lord after their latest argument.

The Doctor looked down from where he had been hitting the door, noticing that there was a door handle protruding from the middle of the wooden pane. He reached out for it to turn it, and yelped in pain when electricity was pumped through the metal, burning the skin of his palm.

"What?" he breathed, looking down at his palm as it continued to sting painfully. Rory sat behind him, saying nothing. The Doctor reached out for the handle again, but the same thing happened; he didn't give up, though, holding onto the handle as it continued to burn him, trying to turn it to open the door, but it wouldn't budge – there was something keeping it from turning.

"Doctor!" Rory finally said, "Let go!"

But the Doctor didn't listen; he held onto the handle – gritting his teeth against the pain – until there was steam rising from the handle where his skin was burning. He finally could take it no longer, and let go of the handle, opening his palm to inspect the damage: there was a dark line across his palm and the crease between his thumb and his forefinger. It throbbed painfully, but he was far too annoyed to really feel it.

Instead, he looked up at the ceiling to have a word with his ship. He took a deep breath to calm himself, before addressing the TARDIS.

"Could I get some nanogenes, please?" he asked, his tone light but with a warning edge. The TARDIS responded with a matter-of-fact hum. "What do you mean, they're not available?" he asked, now feeling his fury rising. "We have a jar of them in the infirmary!"

The TARDIS did not respond, but Rory did.

"Can't we get a first aid kit?" he asked of the ship, standing up from the bed and looking upward.

The Doctor turned to Rory to glare at him. "Nanogenes repair damage at a cellular level," he informed the Roman, "why would I need something as mundane as a first aid kit?"

"Because the nanogenes are not available, and a first aid kit will be able to help you," the nurse replied, turning to the Doctor and balling his hands into fists by his side, his biceps tensing as he glared over at the Doctor.

A small _thump_ resounded from the general direction of the bedside table, and Rory turned to open the drawer underneath the surface of the table. Inside was a first aid kit, which he removed and placed on the bed, sitting next to it as he opened it. He grunted at the Doctor, pointing at the spot on the other side of the red box.

The Doctor let out an annoyed huff of breath, but it was becoming more and more difficult to ignore the intense pain of the burn on his palm, so he begrudgingly took the seat that he was being offered while Rory prepared the contents of the first aid kit. He pulled out a tube of intergalactic aloe vera – which had been genetically altered on a hospital planet on the very edge of the Oort Cloud in the 39th Century – and held out his hand for the Doctor to place his own in.

The Doctor offered his hand, resting the back of his hand against Rory's palm as the nurse squeezed a splodge of thick, green sludge from the tube onto the burn and began to gently rub it in. The Doctor hissed slightly as the ointment stung, but found his mind numbing slightly under the influence of Rory's careful ministrations. He had never noticed how soft his touch was, and how caring he could be. It was often difficult to remember that he had medical training when he was punching Hitler in the face. The Doctor's breathing slowed, and he began to calm, though there remained a steely silence between the two of them and the atmosphere in the room was not yet one that would allow them to calmly sort out their differences.

Rory finished with the burn – which still left an ugly mark on the Doctor's skin, but was feeling much better – and put the tube of aloe vera away, tucking the first aid kit back into the drawer underneath the bedside table. He said nothing as he laid back on the bed with his legs stretched out before him behind where the Doctor was sitting, tucking his arm under his head and closing his eyes, making it painfully clear that he had no intention of having a conversation with the Doctor yet.

The Time Lord respected the Roman's wishes, pushing himself off of the bed and pacing the small corridor between the bottom of the bed and the door, carefully avoiding the door handle as he did so.

The seconds began to stretch into minutes, and still neither of them said anything; the only sound in the room was that of the shuffling of the Doctor's shoes on the floor as he paced. Even the TARDIS was quiet, as though this room was somehow detached from the system of pipes and wires and other bits of electrical engineering which made it work; the longer they remained trapped in the room, the more the Doctor began to wonder if this room had not existed before that day – that it had been created purely for the two of them to settle their differences. He ran this theory by Rory after, what he assumed, had been half an hour since the nurse had tended to the burn on his palm. At first, he thought that Rory had fallen asleep, for he did not respond; then, he let out a small sigh and merely said,

"Probably."

The Doctor didn't try to engage with the Roman again. No one spoke in the room until Rory snapped at the Doctor approximately one hour into their confinement.

"Do you _have_ to do that?" he exclaimed, sitting up abruptly to glare over at the Doctor.

The Doctor pursed his lips, raised his arms in a meaningless gesture and slapped his palms against his thighs – ignoring the shockwave of pain this sent up his arm from the burn that had not been completely healed. "Stop doing what?"

"That pacing!" Rory spat. "It's _so_ annoying!"

The Doctor glowered at the Roman, but stopped his pacing nonetheless, instead leaning against the wall next to the door with his arms crossed over his chest, a scowl on his face and his gaze fixed at the floor.

They didn't speak again until the Doctor began to feel something odd at his back. The scowl dissolved into a thoughtful look as he tried to pin down what exactly had changed about the wall against which was leaning. When he had worked it out, his heart sank slightly as he knew that he would have to tell his companion, even if they were both still obviously angry with each other.

"Uh-oh," he muttered, looking up from the floor at Rory, who had flopped down on the bed again. The Roman sat up, a look of exasperation fixed on his face. He looked like he was desperate to be left alone, and the Doctor would have respected those wishes if he had thought that he could leave him ignorant of this new piece of information.

"What?" Rory sighed.

The Doctor licked his lips nervously, unsure of how to tell him what he had learned. It was times like this, when Rory had that dangerous, stormy look in his eyes, that the Doctor was reminded of all that he must have gone through in those 2000 years waiting outside the Pandorica; he more than likely had killed, and not only did that make him a killer, but it made him a killer who had been driven to taking lives by the Doctor himself.

A killer made by the Doctor was surely scarier than any of the other killers in all of time and space, however good their intentions might have been when they first ripped someone from the universe by their own actions. He would never let Rory know this, but sometimes, when he looked at the Roman and saw him _just_ _staring_, he truly felt fear.

"Umm..." he began, quietly and uncertainly, "the temperature in this room is being raised. It will get incredibly uncomfortable over the next few minutes."

"Minutes?" Rory parroted, a bite to his tone that sent a jolt of fright through the Doctor's veins.

The Doctor gulped slightly before elaborating. "Well, considering the amount that the temperature of the wall has risen over the last five minutes, I estimate that this room will reach over twenty-five degrees Celsius in another three."

Rory sighed exasperatedly, ripping his jacket off of his shoulders and throwing it on the floor, as the temperature in the room began to noticeably change. The Doctor soon began to feel rather sticky himself, and reluctantly discarded his tweed jacket on the floor next to Rory's admittedly lighter garment.

As the room got hotter, Rory could feel the pressure building in his head. It was getting more and more difficult to focus on anything, and it didn't take long for him to begin sweating through his t-shirt. He wondered briefly how the Doctor was faring; he knew from books in the TARDIS library that the core body temperature of Time Lords was significantly lower than that of humans – about 15 degrees – and so if he was feeling so awful, the Doctor must have been feeling even worse.

Indeed, as soon as Rory thought that he would have to ditch his t-shirt, the Doctor stumbled over to the other side of the bed and fell onto it on his back, his face caked in sweat and his white shirt sticking to his torso. As Rory got up, throwing his sodden t-shirt down on the floor next to their jackets, he saw that the Doctor had a sickly pallor to his skin, and he was breathing quickly and rapidly.

"Doctor," he gasped, his voice drying as he dehydrated through the sweat pouring from his skin, "you need to take off your shirt."

"No!" the Doctor shook his head stubbornly.

Rory sighed. "At least the bow tie," he suggested, but this was met with even further protestations. The Doctor reached up to his bow tie, as if protecting it from harm, and muttering about how bow ties were cool under his breath.

Sick and tired of this nonsense, Rory surged forward, reaching hot fingers towards the bow tie sitting at the Doctor's throat. The Doctor yelped, leaping off of the bed and away from Rory, pinching the ends of his bow tie between his forefingers and thumbs so that it couldn't be removed. His hair was soaked, falling into his eyes and surely obstructing his vision. They were now standing on opposite sides of the bed, facing each other off.

There was a stalemate for a moment, where they just stared at each other, before Rory pounced. He side-stepped to the left, around the foot of the bed, just as the Doctor leapt forward, ready to jump over the furniture. But Rory was too fast; he reached out sideways from the end of the bed, grabbing the Doctor's arm and pulling him back. He threw him back on the bed, climbing on top of him and holding him captive between his thighs, his knees on his arms so that he couldn't move.

The Doctor growled in frustration as Rory reached forward for the bow tie, pulling it so that it came off in one swift movement, before he tore the braces from his shoulders and moved onto the buttons of his shirt. They slipped under the sweat covering both the buttons and his fingers, and the Doctor's squirms made it even more difficult to undo them, but eventually they began to come free...

Until Rory realised what was happening: he was shirtless, pinning the Doctor down on a bed and removing the Time Lord's clothes.

He froze as his fingers reached the final button, gaping like a fish and trying desperately to avoid looking at the Doctor's chest which he had been slowly exposing for the last couple of minutes. Both of them were breathing heavily, and the air was considerably more awkward.

Slowly, Rory climbed off of the bed, leaving the last button of the Doctor's dress shirt still done up as he turned away from the Time Lord and ran a hand through his hair. Behind him, he heard the bed springs creak as the Doctor sat up, his legs dangling off of the edge of the bed.

"What's going on, dear?" the Doctor sighed, and Rory knew that the Time Lord was addressing the TARDIS, in that calm and serene voice that he usually used when talking to his ship.

The TARDIS didn't seem to reply, but it obviously had, for the Doctor continued his side of the conversation.

"But-" he began, but was obviously interrupted. He responded to whatever the TARDIS had said with a small chuckle. "Of course."

Rory's brow furrowed at what the Doctor could possibly be talking about with the TARDIS, and as he turned, the Doctor pushed himself off of the end of the bed and onto his feet, his braces falling off of his arms completely as he did so.

"What's going on?" Rory asked, slightly nervous of the answer that the Time Lord would give.

The Doctor smiled, slightly sadly, as he stepped closer to the Roman. Rory tried not to notice that he had undone the last button on his shirt, though the white material was still hung over his shoulders.

"It would seem," the Doctor began, "that this is all in aid of... defusing the tension between us."

Rory snorted; he had known that already. "And was all _this_ really necessary?" He asked, gesturing ambiguously around the room before letting his arm drop back down to his side. "You don't need to boil two people alive to get them to stop arguing."

The Doctor took another step closer, replying in a low rumble, "It's not that kind of tension."

"Wh-" Rory began, but he didn't have the opportunity to finish before the Doctor reached forward to his hips, twisting him and pushing him backwards against the door, and pressing his lips to his.

Rory squeaked in surprise, but the noise morphed into a low hum of pleasure as the pressure on his lips increased. The door was boiling, but he didn't seem to notice as he reached up to the Doctor's shoulders. When the Time Lord pulled back they were both breathing deeply, but even through Rory's fuzzy mind, a bit of guilt still fought its way through the haze.

"What about Amy?" he whispered, suddenly finding it difficult to speak as his vision was filled with deep, deep eyes that had seen far too much over far too long.

"It was her idea," the Doctor replied, just as breathless, and suddenly this all made sense. The entire thing stunk of Amy.

But before Rory could ponder further on that, the Doctor was kissing him again, pushing his lips apart and slipping his tongue between them. The Time Lord pulled him closer, running his fingers up his spine, drawing a gasp from the Roman which was answered with a deep chuckle. As the Doctor's fingertips reached the spot between his shoulder blades, the Roman found his confidence.

With their lips still interlocked, he pushed himself off of the door and twisted, hearing the satisfying _thump_ of the Doctor's back hitting the wood that he had just left. He brought his hands down to the Doctor's stomach, smirking at the sharp intake of breath from the Time Lord as he slowly trailed the tips of his fingers across his torso until he had reached his shoulders again; he slid his hands underneath the white material of his dress shirt and pushed it down his arms. The Doctor had to let go of him as the material passed his hands, landing with a satisfying crumpling sound behind him.

Rory pulled back from the kiss, simpering at the swollen lips of the Time Lord before he leaned in again, pressing his lips against the warm skin of his neck. The Doctor moaned, tilting his head back to give the Roman better access. When he was sure that he had left a mark, Rory pulled away, only to find himself moving backwards again. In their uncoordinated daze, their legs became tangled, and they tripped backwards onto the bed...

~{G}~

Amy waited in the control room for her boys; the TARDIS had been very obliging to her, and had set up a camera in the bedroom for her to watch on the screen hanging over the control panel. She had found the first hour and a half rather boring, the snog rather entertaining, and then found herself incredibly embarrassed and having to switch the screen off and turn away as a blush burned furiously on her cheeks at what happened after that. It was an hour after she had looked away that they stumbled back into the control room, their hair mussed up and their expressions sheepish.

She was lying on the sofa when they emerged from the depths of the TARDIS, her arm slung over the back as she watched them enter the room with a knowing smirk playing on her lips.

The Doctor walked awkwardly passed her and began flicking switches on the control panel, while Rory leaned over the back of the sofa to press a kiss to her lips. When he pulled back, she chuckled.

"No more fighting?" she asked, looking between Rory and the Doctor.

"Uh... no," Rory answered. "No more fighting."

The Doctor turned round to shoot Amy a small smile, which she returned.

"Well, any time you need to defuse the tension," she grinned, tapping her husband on the shoulder and getting up to head for the stairs, "you know what to do. Just let me know, and I'll leave you two to it."

"Uh, so we're not getting a divorce?" Rory called after her, a slight panicked edge to his voice.

"No!" she shouted back, leaving them two alone once more. Once she was in the corridor beyond, she tapped the wall affectionately. "Cheers," she thanked the TARDIS, and was answered with a low hum.

As the TARDIS watched The Girl Who Waited walk through the corridors to the bedroom that she shared with her husband, the ship considered the first hurdle to have been jumped; now, she had to work on the love aspect of this particular triangle…


End file.
